"Jarrad Waterloo" <jwaterloo@dynamicquest.com> wrote in message news:20060524184833.5667B14A8001@dqmail.dynamicquest.com...
Here are my comments concerning Maarten's infinite precision integer draft. I would not wait to submit this library to boost before these following features because people are in need of it now.
1) The ability to extract sub integers out of an integer such as the integer at bit offset 3 and length of 4. This is especially helpful in the area of RFID where large unsigned integers are partitioned into smaller integers.
Thanks for your comments. Extracting sub integers can also be done with the bitwise operators, for example partitioning the integer x into 4-bit length: integer mask( 1 ); mask <<= 4; --mask; integer xsh( x ), temp; while( !xsh.is_zero() ) { temp = xsh & mask; // do something with temp xsh >>= 4; }; So this ability is already available.
2) The ability to convert integer to bases other than base 10; any really from base 2-36
The iostreams of the compilers I know only alow bases 8, 10 and 16, see also [lib.std.manip] setbase manipulator. The bases 2, 4, 5 can be easily converted from these bases. The other bases don't seem to have a useful application; they are also not supported for base type int, and not supported by printf formats or stream manipulators.
3) An implementation of a fixed sized stack version of the integer_allocator. This may be useful for performance when someone is not working with an infinite precision integer but a very large one such as 512 or 1024 bits.
Users can implement such an allocator by deriving from integer_allocator, override and implement allocate, reallocate and deallocate, and activate it.
4) An unsigned version of the integer class that benefits from the higher performance of unsigned operations
Users can implement an unsigned_integer by deriving from integer, but this will not give any performance gain. By the way I think base type unsigned int is also not faster than base type int.
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